I had so much fun at grounded, I figured I would check out another Fringe show when I got back from traveling. Arranged to go with a different friend this time, picked a recommended show, a musical, one that was billed as a comedy, and off we went.

I’ll admit, I felt a bit excited being in line the second time. I knew about the membership thing (based on grounded, and my one viff experience this year), so helped redirect people as we were waiting. Get into the theater, its pretty packed. Managed to find a pair of seats on the side, unlike the giant movie theaters, being on the side really didn’t matter too much.

Show opens with a woman sitting down on a couch, putting headphones on, watching tv on her laptop. Few seconds later, a friend shows up, all sniffling and huffy. Ends up rolling herself up in the carpet (hard to explain). Lastly shows up the third friend. These turn out to be the main cast, with one more guy showing up later rounding out the cast to a total of 4.The main guy’s voice was absolutely amazing, I’m kinda sad he didn’t sing more.

It was a very cute little show. Touched on a lot of stuff, threw in a bunch of humor where they could, but nothing to overshadow things too much. When the characters announced they were all sub 25, I kinda groaned a bit, but thier youngness and naivety helped a lot with the concepts. Worked really well.

A couple things hit really close to home. Probably more than I’d want to talk about. But I found it uncomfortable that as the one characters birthday was coming up, the big two-five, the other two decided it was to go out for drinks and clubbing. The birthday one kept saying teasing no, stay home and watch doctor who. I’ll admit, I still hate that attitude that people can only have fun getting drunk.

But yea, overall well done. Delivered the message that everyone is different. Talking is important. Things won’t just be okay because you want them to. Growing up isn’t all that scary. Etc. I know I felt sad at times, probably unintentional, but I did realy enjoy it. I’ll admit, I even started to crush on at least one character by the end.

Last weekend my friend Joanna Gaskell stared in this fringe festival play called Grounded. Other than knowing it was about a female fighter pilot, I went in not knowing anything else about it. I’ve been finding the more I do it, the more I enjoy the entire experience. This would also be my first experience with anything fringe festival related.

So a friend and I got tickets for opening night, arrive at this tiny little theater. Once I got inside, realized its was this tiny little theatre and had a moment of panic. What did I get myself into. Buuuut, right from the opening sequence, all the way to the end, it was such an amazing experience. It turns out she was in was in this (mostly) one woman dramatic play. I’ve never seen anything like this before. I had worked on big productions as a teen, but this was just a simple set, one and a half costumes, and Joanna.

I was constantly surprised how emotional I felt throughout the performance. Joanna really nailed everything. She starts off describing her emotional state as a pilot, flying through the sky, being a god in the sky, to meeting someone awesome, having a kid, all the way to the roller coaster ride that was being turned into a drone pilot.

I don’t really want to say much more, other than I laughed at parts, felt uncomfortable at parts, even cried at parts. Was such an amazing ride.

There’s a few more shows this upcoming weekend. I highly recommend grabbing tickets.

I liked it so much I’m actually going to check out another fringe show. Look at me. Two whole fringe shows in one year.

I really need to remember to post here more often. What have I been up lately? A bunch of traveling for work.

Microsoft Visual Studio Parter summit

Atlassian Connect Week

Jenkins World 2016 (Upcoming)

And the one event I went to as me, not really representing sauce labs

Cascadia 2016

I had a big blast at pretty much all of them. Most of them got me into the tinkering mood again.

Because of Cascadia, I learned about greenkeeper and have since hooked it up to a bunch of my node projects. At times the influx of pull requests to update dependancies is kinda annoying, but it forces me to keep my tests up and running. So far i’ve been pretty happy with it.

At connect week, I learned about this codegiest competition/hackathon they were hosting. I already had 2 entries due to work on some projects at sauce labs. But I really wanted to do something fun and silly. So I revisited the dance party plugin Jlipps created for our internal hubot. It gave me an excuse to use a bunch of the hipchat apis that I wouldn’t normally use, and was able to create Hipchat Dance Party. Totally available for free in the market place.

Next up would be hubot-jenkins-notifier. I’ll admit, I didn’t fully understand the bug that the one user opened, but they were willing to create a pull request. He admittedly didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but was very receptive to feedback. After over a month of slow back and forth, I decided I was happy enough with it, but I wanted better test coverage of the project as a whole. So chatted with him, came up with a better config schema, merged everything, and started the rewrite. The code is now super cleaned up, nice objects that can easily be tested. No more horrible coffeescript. He’s happy with the result and so am I. As soon as I get a few more real life test users, i’ll be cutting a new release.

codacy-maven-plugin – Due to some of my projects being solo at Sauce Labs, I have had my eye out for various open source tooling to keep an eye on my code for me. I tried out gemnasium for a while, but that wouldn’t support java. Greenkeeper as mentioned above is great, but again, not java. Codecov has been great for reporting coverage, and I’ve used it very liberallly, Then I stumbled onto codacy. Codacy is multiple languages and builds you a report on code quality. In java, it uses findbugs, for javascript, it uses eslint. It also has a whole slew of built in checks and functionality. You can totally check out one of my projects to see some of its output. My only real complaint was that unlike codecov, which was just pip install codecov, for java code coverage, you needed to install another java package manager, then install a script, along the way there was https errors, etc. So decided it was worth it to learn a bit more about how maven goals are created, and just more about maven in general. Codacy-maven-plugin was created. This means with maven which is already installed and used to compile java projects, could also be used to upload coverage reports.

And lastly, one of my old standbys, Infinicatr, my old mobile web project that scrolls through a seemly unlimited number of cat pictures. After cascadia I was re-invigorated to learn more about service works. Its usually between salty stories and infinicatr to play around with “new” web tech. I really wanted to see if I could make infinicatr work offline. It turned out to be really easy. Using a service worker, I was able to returned cached values if flickr was unable to respond for any reason, and live network requests otherwise. This meant that once the first batch of 10 images were fetched, it would always appear to be online and working. I’m pretty happy with this result. Source

My next plan of course is to apply it to the old Salty Stories book engine so it can be properly supported offline, instead of the semi hacked version i’m depending on now.

My mom got me a GoPro last year for my birthday, and as the weather has gotten a lot nicer, I’ve been using it for various projects.

About a month ago now, I picked up this really cheap accessory pack off amazon. Its been a lot of fun to play with the various attachments and components.

Yesterday on my bike ride to work, I decided it might be fun try out the chest harness. I put it on. Checked that it all worked. Everything seemed to work just fine. I didn’t really think about how on a bike you are at least slightly bent over. The results? 45 min of looking at my handle bars. Its kinda fun to try to figure out where I am from the various peices you can see.

My next favourite experiement would be the suction cup mount. I stuck it to my outer window, and let it run for a little bit. Then timelapsed/sped up the 20 minute video down to 15 seconds.

One of my personal goals for this year is to start getting more comfortable sharing knowledge and talking infront of large crowds. As such, I volunteered to give a quick talk on testing, as its always been something I love doing, and ion the new job I thought it would be pretty appropriate.

This is my second Code and Coffee talk ever, and I can see I’m still pretty nervious giving the talk, but I think other than a few technical glitches (which were thankfully edited out) it went really well.

I have so much fun doing them. I love the fact that people come up to you afterwards and walk to talk about topics.

Totally open for more ideas on what to talk about. So far I’ve done Vagrant and now Testing in general. I’d love more suggestions.

I’ve been really enjoying the pizza experiements I’ve been doing lately. Last night’s pizza was left over bbq sauce, pulled chicken, mushrooms and onions. Also tried out throwing in garlic and italian herbs into the crust.

The Back to the Future Game game created by Telltale came out in December 2010. As of yesterday (Feb 7th 2016) I finally got around to finishing the game. That’s over 5 years for those who are doing math.

I’m not entirely sure why I picked it up again. I know I’ve been itching to get through the slew of games I’ve kickstarted over the last few years.

Back to the future was actually a kinda slow game to me. I got frustrated a couple of times by the canned responses when items I figured you could show people just say “I don’t know what to do with that” type response. Some of the cutscenes felt slow and long too.

But overall, I really enjoyed it, especially the last couple chapters and the ending itself. If they ever release another adventure, especially with the newer engines, I’d probably pick it up. It was great fun. I loved the fact that Christopher Lloyd actually did all the voice acting for Doc. Micheal J Fox actually showed up a bit for the final chapter. The recurring characters were actually well thought out and enjoyable (or hated in an enjoyable way).

—

For various reasons over the years, I haven’t been gaming all that much. I know some of it had to do with my monitor (which was also really old). Some had to do with the two bouts of Bells Paulsy, which caused minor eye damage. I suspect desk layout contributed as well. It might help that I’m back to doing a pure development job again.

Suffice to say, This year I’ve already finished two games, that’s more than the last few years.

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I'm a software developer at the awesome Sauce Labs. I do a bunch of other random open source development. I also play games, both board and video games and love to read.
You can usually find me on various services as halkeye